Weekend tech reading: Cryptocurrency valuations still rising, 3 years on a Hackintosh

What the hell is happening to cryptocurrency valuations? The total market cap for all cryptocurrencies just surpassed $100 billion. The vast majority of these gains have come in just the last few months — on April 1st the total market cap was just over $25 billion — representing a 300 percent increase in value in just over 60 days. While some of these gains are from bitcoin itself (BTC is up ~160 percent in the same two-month time frame), other digital currencies like Ethereum are also responsible for the increase, which on its own has increased ~439 percent over the last two months. TechCrunch (also, 3 reasons the cryptocurrency exchange market is maturing & Cryptoeconomics 101)

My experience using hackintosh low-end PC for 3 years Almost 3 years ago I installed Mac OS X mavericks for the first time on my personal computer, before this I used a lot of distributions of gnu linux. but sometimes I had heard about Mac OS X and hackintosh, in that moment it seemed something Impossible to do. After spending hours reading guides in forums, reddit, tonymac86. I decided to try installing mavericks. The first thing I did was to download a torrent of niresh. For that moment there was no support for Yosemite. Jhonny Arana

Pirate Bay founder: We’ve lost the internet, it’s all about damage control now At its inception, the internet was a beautifully idealistic and equal place. But the world sucks and we’ve continuously made it more and more centralized, taking power away from users and handing it over to big companies. And the worst thing is that we can’t fix it — we can only make it slightly less awful. The Next Web

An open letter to Microsoft: A 64-bit OS is better than a 32-bit OS There are a few absolutes in life – death, taxes, and that a 64-bit OS is better than a 32-bit OS. Moving over to a 64-bit OS allows your laptop to run BOTH the old compatible 32-bit processes and also the new 64-bit processes. In other words, there is zero downside (and there are gigantic upsides). Backblaze

Following the money hobbled vDOS attack-for-hire service A new report proves the value of following the money in the fight against dodgy cybercrime services known as “booters” or “stressers” — virtual hired muscle that can be rented to knock nearly any website offline. Last fall, two 18-year-old Israeli men were arrested for allegedly running vDOS, perhaps the most successful booter service of all time. Krebs on Security

Automate the freight: maritime drone deliveries Ships at sea are literally islands unto themselves. If what you need isn’t on board, good luck getting it in the middle of the Pacific. As such, most ships are really well equipped with spare parts and even with raw materials and the tools needed to fabricate most of what they can’t store, and mariners are famed for their ability to make do with what they’ve got. Hackaday (also, Japan to launch self-navigating cargo ships 'by 2025')

It’s been so windy in Europe that electricity prices have turned negative It's been very windy across Europe this week. So much so, in fact, that the high wind load on onshore and offshore wind turbines across much of the continent has helped set new wind power records. For starters, renewables generated more than half of Britain's energy demand on Wednesday—for the first time ever. Vice

Amazon lent $1 billion to merchants to boost sales on its marketplace Amazon.com Inc has stepped up lending to third-party sellers on its site who are looking to grow their business, a company executive said in an interview on Wednesday. The e-commerce giant has doled out more than $1 billion in small loans to sellers in the past 12 months, compared with more than $1.5 billion it lent from 2011 through 2015, said Peeyush Nahar, vice president for Amazon Marketplace. Reuters

DARPA funds development of new type of processor A completely new kind of non-von-Neumann processor called a HIVE — Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit — is being funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) to the tune of $80 million over four-and-a-half years. Chipmakers Intel and Qualcomm are participating in the project, along with a national laboratory, a university and a defense contractor North Grumman. EE Times

Xbox Unleashed: Our deep-dive study of how millions use Xbox Live For three years now, Ars’ Steam Gauge project and the public sampling projects it has inspired (such as Steam Spy) have provided an important behind-the-scenes look at what kinds of games are popular on PC gaming’s most popular marketplace. Today, after years of work, we’re ready to unveil a new effort that similarly uncovers what’s popular among Xbox Live users on the Xbox One and Xbox 360. Ars Technica